Shivanee Ramlochan's Blog

If you have spent any time at all in Port of Spain, you will know — like this poem knows — that it is worth writing about.

“Connel, Morning” comes from the section of You Have You Father Hard Head that focuses on travel: international to inside your backyard, these poems call on their travellers to remark on what is both remarkable and fascinatingly mundane, from flies to skyscrapers, ...

We are who we are because of those who made us, or so we’ve been told. We model our lives in the shadows and the halos of our parents, and their parents before them: it’s part of what makes us get through the hard, hard grift of living, sometimes — this notion that we’re acting for our legacy, and in defense of the legacy left for us. Be the kind of woman your mother would be proud to call daughter, or, ...

If we are lucky within our sorrow, those who die before us tell us exactly how they wish to be mourned.

You can take “The Plural of Me” in this spirit. For me, right now at least, it’s difficult to read this poem without wondering if this precisely is how Colin the human being would like to be remembered, would choose his loved ones to live with him. In the poem, the speaker makes a simple exhortation of th...

We never know when we’ll be called on to dive.

Robinson’s erotic poems have long been footsoldiers in the frontlines of my heart’s reaching for meaning. If I am ever unsure I’ll find it in living, I know I’ll feel it in poems like “Waiting for your Gun”, which poises a speaker on the slippery edge of a diving board, holding them there in self-censuring shame over the roundness of their gut, the enormity of the...

The poem is telling us about shapeshifting.

One of the earliest poems in Colin Robinson’s You Have You Father Hard Head, “I Want to Bite” is a spare, enigmatic offering, showing the reader vignettes in eight movements. I am fortunate enough to be a nameless stagehand at these scenes, not remotely pivotal to them in any way, but a certain kind of present, a particular sense in which I was both there and no...

Novel Niche is thrilled to unveil this exclusive interview with Anu Lakhan, Trinidadian poet, fiction writer, editor and debut chapbookist. First published by Argotiers Press in 2018, Letters to K is hilarious and heartbreaking, audacious and abashed, like no other letter-set to a dead writer you’ve ever read before. 

Here, I sit with Lakhan over metaphysical tea, and let her tell me all about the elusive J_L_, our protagonist writing missives to Kafka. I might know less for certain at the en...

Image: The whistle, posted at Flickr by Amanjeev under a Creative Commons License. Image cropped.

Willa Cather says, “The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.” What might strike some as an inscrutable terror – how dare we be denied ultimate knowledge of our most intimate? – is an occasion for joy in Mary Oliver’s “The Whistler”.

The scene is tender, domestic, everyday: the speaker is reading in the upstairs bedroom, and their companion, who...

Image: Lion Fish, posted at Flickr by Dave Scriven under a Creative Commons License.

I’ve seen fish being caught off the rocky outcropping of the North Coast at night. What transfixed me most was how violently, how viciously they struggled against death: it’s been years, and still, vividly, I can summon the muscular thrash of a fish torso, the rippling menace of tail sluicing seawater through the black sky, the mute outrage at being plucked from the water with a hook in its mouth. It did not...

Image: Wild Geese, posted at Flickr by liz west under a Creative Commons License.

In Las Lomas where I grew up and still return every Sunday morning, wild parrots wake me up, the incantation of their united screech a resonant, strangely innervating chorus. I have always felt the press of the wild more closely in Las Lomas, and it is a complicated wilderness. I have had a calamitous, giddy lifetime of loving the bush but not always loving myself there. I think Mary Oliver would have understood...

Image: Aspen Santa Fe Ballet – Teatro Arcimboldi, posted at Flickr by Elisa Banfi under a Creative Commons License.

The Dhammapada gives us what might be one of the most perfectly concentrated poems:

“There is no fire like passion;
there is no losing throw like hatred;
there is no pain like this body;
there is no happiness higher than rest.”

The fact that there is no pain like this body is the root, the seed, and the fountain of so much that calls itself poetry. “How to Fix a Dancer When it B...